My Mac (OS 10.4.5) is connected to two Squeezeboxes wirelessly using two Airport Extreme base stations as main and remote in a WDS network (the Mac to main base station is a wired connection). By the way, my DHCP server is my router, wired to the main base station.

Apple states (and I have tested this) that the network names of the two stations in a WDS network must be the same.

So how can I tell which base station the Squeezebox is connecting to, and can I force it to choose one over the other?

I think I previously had the stations with different network names, which solved the issue, and that the requirement for the same name is fairly new.

I am asking the question because I think the SB can see both base stations and is actually connecting to the main one rather than the remote, which leads to a much lower signal. The whole point of the setup was to get a higher signal by connecting to the remote station. The second SB gets a much higher signal, though it is very much further from either base station (I suspect that it can only see the remote station).

Not that the low signal leads to problems with music at present, but I would prefer it to be higher.

Steve Baumgarten

2006-03-04, 16:16

danco wrote:

> So how can I tell which base station the Squeezebox is connecting to,
> and can I force it to choose one over the other?

I had a similar problem and solved it by turning on MAC filtering and
setting things up so that Squeezebox connection attempts are rejected by
the "undesirable" access point.

SBB

danco

2006-03-04, 17:00

Thanks, that did it. Just set the main base station to only accept the remote station, not the SB.

Had to go through the setup again on the SB, at first it couldn't find the network. But now it is getting a sensible 80% strength while before it was hovering around 20% (the more distant SB had around 60%).

snoogly

2007-03-30, 00:29

danco wrote:

> So how can I tell which base station the Squeezebox is connecting to,
> and can I force it to choose one over the other?

I had a similar problem and solved it by turning on MAC filtering and
setting things up so that Squeezebox connection attempts are rejected by
the "undesirable" access point.

SBB

How does one do that?

jeffmeh

2007-03-30, 06:32

How does one do that?

Normally you can set MAC address filtering by going to the administration page of the wireless router or access point, entering the MAC addresses it should accept, and enabling MAC address filtering.

snoogly

2007-03-30, 14:26

Thanks - I've got it now. It's so simple - yet I just couldn't get my head around it.

Now my bedroom SB3 is happily connected to the remote base station, and is enjoying a 99% signal strength.